The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups
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I entered into SpaceX four times. I couldn't leave. Like, it was the dream. I spent about a decade at Tesla and got to run around the battery supply chain.
Chandler Lujitsa is the CEO of Galaday next generation missile propulsion. Turner Caldwell is the CEO of Mariana Minerals, critical mineral supply chains.
When Elon sets like super aggressive targets, the goal is actually to get the team to think really deliberately. There's a thousand things that have to happen, but a 100 of them cannot be done in six months, so we have to go attack those 100 things.
Being somewhat foreign to the missile industry, I realized we don't have enough. They cost too much, we can't make it fast enough. But my background being purely in liquid propulsion across SpaceX and even at UCLA launching liquid rockets is a very real way to apply this technology systems, and we're gonna do it.
What is the single most important thing that you learned at SpaceX or Tesla that you now apply every single day at your companies?
The companies that define an era don't just ship products. They produce founders. In 2002, SpaceX had 160 employees building a rocket most engineers thought would fail. Two decades later, its alumni have founded more than 100 companies, many in the hardest sectors of the physical economy. Tesla's pipeline runs parallel, but the real lessons these founders carry aren't the ones that make headlines. Not flat org as dogma, but systems that prevent data silos at 100 person scale. Not vertical integration as ideology, but as a survival question: Does the company exist without it? The gap between my
I spend a lot of my time with founders building in the physical world. And one thing that keeps coming up is how many of them trained at Tesla and SpaceX. People talk about the mythology, the all nighters, the flat org, the impossible deadlines. The best part is no part. But beyond the myths are repeatable practices that change how teams build and ship complex hardware. Chandler Lujitsa is the CEO of Galaday, next generation missile propulsion, and Turner Caldwell is the CEO of Mariana Minerals, critical mineral supply chains. Chandler was the lead propulsion engineer on Starship. Turner led b
Yeah. I think being somewhat foreign to the missile industry until the summer of last year, right as I jumped into it, I realized we don't have enough. They cost too much, and we can't make them fast enough. And it seemed like everyone in the industry is kinda doing it the same old way. And I think in order to get drastically different results, you have to do things drastically differently. So with my background being purely in liquid propulsion across SpaceX and even at UCLA launching liquid rockets is a very real way to apply this technology to missile systems, and we're gonna go do it. So
Awesome. And what about you, Turner?
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